'cause it's hard to see from where I'm standin'

Obama called the Cambridge police “stupid” and, later, apologized for his words but, while he failed the cardinal rule of politics (never say what you think), I believe his first instinct was correct.

So clearly correct that the only real complaint on Obama’s statemanship – just as Krugman actually admitted in a recent column on the topic of health care – is not about his views as his politics. It’s politically unfortunate to made any bold statement, no matter how right it is.

Charles Blow sums up what the real issue is about, despite the equivocating from the pundits and the policemen associations closing ranks around their boys. Was it a case of racial profiling? I think the woman who called 911 is most guilty if there is such a claim. Was the encounter racially tinged? Duh. Did the policeman act professionally? Hell the fuck no.

Professional means doing your job, saying thank you and going home. Once you have answered the call and ascertained that, no, it is not a break-in, you turn and go home. The inability for a cop to admit error is what causes this to escalate. Gun justice is why the police are so universally reviled: They are goons. Nobody should be forced to tiptoe around the cop, least of all people who have been historically targeted by same.

Had to move a friend to Boston recently; burnt $80 in fuel grinding a U-Haul up I-95. I never really had that many positive things to say about Bensonhurst, but now compared to Jamaica Plain I think it can be viewed favorably. That place is a second-story man’s wet dream.

Best parts: The New York movers on Boston, “wouldn’t wanna move there, this life or the next,” the Boston movers on New York, “this was packed professionally? You got robbed.” The cabbie in Boston back to South Station hailed from the Bronx: “Love New York, mon. Always hustlin. Always everybody wan goin figure out ways ta rip you the hell off. You wouldn’t like Boston, mon. Too slow,” said he in a retrofitted yellow cab complete with bulletproof divider and non-functioning LCD. The cabbie in New York picking me up from Chinatown: “Three hours from Boston*? Musta been tearin ass to get outta there.”

Boston, to me, in the times that I’ve been there and having just gone there Sunday, is irrepressibly parochial. It is a college town in every sense of the term. All the nosiness of small communities, all the exclusion of large cities: As if you’re witnessing a whole people assiduously avoiding having to acknowledge, however implicitly, the existence of other people. They are in their world, and they have meticulously maintained it such that it bears no relation to anything around them. You get the sense that you’re being placed under the microscope at the same time as being purposefully ignored.

New York is, in comparison, provincial: It’s a big city with a big city air, but what people lack in physical privacy they make up in a long, complicated set of protocol not to get in the way of their fellow man. Bostonians, however, got right up in my face with questions that would seem bold to a New Yorker. The best way I can describe it is like the satirical view of 60s hippie communes: Professing to be all-encompassingly open but ending up being more fascist than regular society in practice, with merely the patina of polite lingo to smooth over an indirect request that you get the fuck out.

Oh, and their pizza sucks.

It is a city of New England brahmin privilege. So it came as no surprise that in the same general time frame of my being there, professor Henry Gates – director of Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research (the same institute and the same university that chased off Cornel West for being too radical) – was arrested by Cambridge police after a neighbor called the cops on him for breaking into his own home.

Ostensibly the reason was because he was belligerent (in his own home) when the cops came to arrest him (in his own home), as the charge (that later got dropped) was disorderly conduct (in his own home), but if you can’t be belligerent in your own home that the cops are removing you from for breaking and entering, then pardon me, but what the fuck? That’s like arresting somebody for the sole charge of resisting arrest!

If it wasn’t for Franken (D-Five Days in Office), the hearings would be unbearable – the Daily Show is right, he’s a walking SNL skit. Face it, GOP, if you wanna get outta the hole you’ve dug, you gotta stop digging.

In a nutshell

Words of an urban indian. Musings on the nature of civilized society, city forms and bureaucratic processes, class and race consciousness, complaining, ranting and more ranting, along with whatever the hell else piques one's interest nowadays.

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To quote H. L. Mencken, "The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."